Then she opened her mouth to scream—and recognised me. It was what I'd been waiting for. She froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, "It's you."

Meet Jake. A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but you'd never suspect it. Nonstop sex and exercise will do that for you—and a diet with lots of animal protein. Jake is a werewolf, and after the unfortunate and violent death of his one contemporary, he is now the last of his species. Although he is physically healthy, Jake is deeply distraught and lonely.Jake's depression has carried him to the point where he is actually contemplating suicide—even if it means terminating a legend thousands of years old. It would seem to be easy enough for him to end everything. But for very different reasons there are two dangerous groups pursuing him who will stop at nothing to keep him alive.Here is a powerful, definitive new version of the werewolf legend—mesmerising and incredibly sexy. In Jake, Glen Duncan has given us a werewolf for the twenty-first century—a man whose deeds can only be described as monstrous but who is in some magical way deeply human. One of the most original, audacious, and terrifying novels in years.From the Hardcover edition.

Details

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Gr

Date: July 2011

Excerpts

From the book

1

"It's official," Harley said. "They killed the Berliner two nights ago. You're the last." Then after a pause: "I'm sorry."

Yesterday evening this was. We were in the upstairs library of his Earl's Court house, him standing at a tense tilt between stone hearth and oxblood couch, me in the window seat with a tumbler of forty-five-year-old Macallan and a Camel Filter, staring out at dark London's fast-falling snow. The room smelled of tangerines and leather and the fire's pine logs. Forty-eight hours on I was still sluggish from the Curse. Wolf drains from the wrists and shoulders last. In spite of what I'd just heard I thought: Madeline can give me a massage later, warm jasmine oil and the long-nailed magnolia hands I don't love and never will.

"What are you going to do?" Harley said.

I sipped, swallowed, glimpsed the peat bog plashing white legs of the kilted clan Macallan as the whisky kindled in my chest. It's official. You're the last. I'm sorry. I'd known what he was going to tell me. Now that he had, what? Vague ontological vertigo. Kubrik's astronaut with the severed umbilicus -spinning away all alone into infinity . . . At a certain point one's imagination refused. The phrase was: It doesn't bear thinking about. Manifestly it didn't.

"Marlowe?"

"This room's dead to you," I said. "But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy." No exaggeration. Harley's collection's worth a million-six, books he doesn't go to anymore because he's entered the phase of having given up reading. If he lives another ten years he'll enter the next phase--of having gone back to it. Giving up reading seems the height of maturity at first. Like all such heights a false summit. It's a human thing. I've seen it countless times. Two hundred years, you see everything countless times.

"I can't imagine what this is like for you," he said.

"Neither can I."

"We need to plan."

I didn't reply. Instead let the silence fill with the alternative to planning. Harley lit a Gauloise and topped us up with an unsteady hand, lilac-veined and liver-spotted these days. At seventy he maintains longish thinning grey hair and a plump nicotined moustache that looks waxed but isn't. There was a time when his young men called him Buffalo Bill. Now his young men know Buffalo Bill only as the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs. During periods of psychic weakness he leans on a bone-handled cane, though he's been told by his doctor it's ruining his spine.

"The Berliner," I said. "Grainer killed him?"

"Not Grainer. His Californian protégé, Ellis."

"Grainer's saving himself for the main event. He'll come after me alone."

Harley sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. I know what scares him: If I die first there'll be no salving surreality between him and his conscience. Jake Marlowe is a monster, fact. Kills and devours people, fact. Which makes him, Harley, an accessory after the fact, fact. With me alive, walking and talking and doing the lunar shuffle once a month he can live in it as in a decadent dream. Did I mention my best friend's a werewolf, by the way? Dead, I'll force a brutal awakening. I helped Marlowe get away with murder. He'll probably kill himself or go once and for all mad. One of his upper left incisors is full gold, a dental anachronism that suggests semicraziness anyway.

"Next full moon," he said. "The rest of the Hunt's been ordered to stand down. It's Grainer's party. You know what he's like."

Indeed. Eric Grainer is the Hunt's Big Dick. All upper-echelon members of WOCOP (World Organisation for the...

Reviews

"Glorious . . . I can't help thinking that wry, world-weary Jake Marlowe would make a fabulous dinner companion. Just not during a full moon." - Justin Cronin, The New York Times Book Review

"Duncan has finally driven a stake through vampire supremacy . . . Cerebral and campy, philosophical and ironic, The Last Werewolf is a novel that's always licking its bloody lips and winking at us . . . A dark thriller that explodes with enough conspiracies, subterfuges and murders to raise your hackles. Not to mention such hot werewolf sex that you'll be tempted to wander out under the full moon yourself next month." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A shocking new take on the werewolf legend . . . Intelligent, fast-moving, creative, and thrilling." - The Daily Beast

"The Last Werewolf is like an updated version of Dracula, only for werewolves, and as rewritten by Bret Easton Ellis . . . In its own blood-crazed and sex-dazed way, The Last Werewolf makes the case for literature." - Stephen Poole, The Guardian (UK)

"Okay, no hyperbole, just an admission: I loved this novel. It's a howl, a rager, a scream. May The Last Werewolf put a stake through the heart of humorless, overwrought vampire sagas. Two big thumb-claws up!" - Chris Bohjalian, author of Secrets of Eden, The Double Bind, and Midwives

"A brilliantly original thriller, a love story, a witty treatise on male (and female) urges, even an existential musing on what it is to be human. Get one for yourself and one for the Twilight fan in your life." - James Medd, The Word (UK)

"Space should be cleared for this violent, sexy thriller . . . The answer to Twilight that adults have been waiting for." - Courtney Jones, Booklist